Middle managers, able to plan and coordinate production independently of elite-executive control, shared not just the responsibilities but also the income and status gained from running their companies. More broadly, a 1952 report by Fortune magazine found that two-thirds of senior executives had more than 20 years’ service at their current companies. At McDonald’s, Ed Rensi worked his way up from flipping burgers in the 1960s to become CEO. In 1939, for example, all save two of the grocery chain Safeway’s division managers had started their careers behind the checkout counter. The saying “from the mail room to the corner office” captured something real, and even the most menial jobs opened pathways to promotion. The mid-century corporation’s workplace training and many-layered hierarchy built a pipeline through which the top jobs might be filled. They were charged with planning and coordinating the development of their own skills to serve the long-run interests of their employers. Even production workers became, on account of lifetime employment and workplace training, functionally the lowest-level managers. Mid-century labor unions (which represented a third of the private-sector workforce), organized the lower rungs of a company’s hierarchy into an additional control center-as part of what the United States Supreme Court, writing in 1960, called “ industrial self-government”-and in this way also contributed to the management function. At IBM, for example, a 40-year worker might spend more than four years, or 10 percent, of his work life in fully paid, IBM-provided training. In turn, companies taught workers the skills they needed to rise up the ranks. Elaborately layered middle managers-or “ organization men”-coordinated production among long-term employees. Every worker, from the CEO down to production personnel, served partly as a manager, participating in planning and coordination along an unbroken continuum in which each job closely resembled its nearest neighbor. In the middle of the last century, management saturated American corporations. This makes the question of who gets to be a manager extremely consequential. And managers as a class capture much of this value as pay. Because complex goods and services require much planning and coordination, management (even though it is only indirectly productive) adds a great deal of value. Instead, they plan what goods and services a company will provide, and they coordinate the production workers who make the output. Managers do not produce goods or deliver services.
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Management consultants advise managers on how to run companies McKinsey alone serves management at 90 of the world’s 100 largest corporation s. The answers also explain why the Democratic Party’s left wing is so suspicious of the nice and obviously impressive young man who wishes to be president.
The answers to these questions put management consultants at the epicenter of economic inequality and the destruction of the American middle class. J ohn McWhorter: The woke attack on Pete Buttigieg How did this come to pass? And what consequences has the rise of management consulting had for the organization of American business and the lives of American workers? But the conventional nature of the career path makes it more, not less, worthy of examination. This move was predictable, not eccentric: The top graduates of elite colleges typically pass through McKinsey or a similar firm before settling into their adult career. He could have taken any number of jobs and, moreover, had no obvious interest in business. When Pete Buttigieg accepted a position at the management consultancy McKinsey & Company, he already had sterling credentials: high-school valedictorian, a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a Rhodes Scholarship.
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